Teaching Students Bedside Manners Before They Hit Medical School

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Pre-med students at Santa Clara University are learning bedside manners before they hit medical school through the university’s Health Care Ethics Internship for Undergraduates. It’s a year-long program that puts students in hospitals and teaches them about ethical dilemmas in the medical field. Students shadow health care professionals such as doctors, nurses, and social workers as they rotate through 12 departments, including intensive care, emergency room, and pediatrics at three locations (O’Connor Hospital in San Jose, Calif., Seton Medical Center in Daly City, Calif., and Hospice of the Valley also in San Jose, Calif.). The students are included in family and multi-disciplinary meetings and encounter ethical issues such as end of life, informed consent, controversial treatment options, patient safety and well-being, and discharge planning. The purpose is to elicit questions about some of the ethical situations they’re encountering, as well expose them to the day-to-day health care, which many are interested in as a career.

“The internship I did at SCU helped me learn more about the social and ethical dimensions of the practice of medicine, which are sometimes lacking in medical schools”

“I recognize and sympathize with the differing points of view about the kind of care each person wants,” says Nicholas Giustini, who recently applied to several medical schools. “When I’m working as a physician, I’ll be in their shoes, facing the same situation and trying to find the best course of action. And I will have to live with the decision I ultimately make.”

Giustini is a senior at SCU, who signed up for the internship program after hearing about it from his friends and his older brother, Andrew, who did it in his senior year back in 2005-06.

“The internship I did at SCU helped me learn more about the social and ethical dimensions of the practice of medicine, which are sometimes lacking in medical schools,” says Andrew Giustini, who’s currently attending Dartmouth Medical School.

Medical ethics isn’t introduced to students until they are in medical and nursing schools, but Assistant Director of Health Care Ethics Courtenay Bruce believes students should be exposed to medical ethics at the college level.

“We want to cultivate a sense of morality and a sense of self as early as we can before they get into medical and nursing schools and are inundated by the science,” she says.

After students spend five hours a week at one of the hospitals, they participate in biweekly reflection sessions, which are led by Bruce. In these sessions, students use an ethical framework to consider case studies and theoretical approaches to medical ethics. While the group discusses some of the real issues that surfaced during their shifts, Bruce also has them analyze fictional situations such as those depicted in ABC’s medical drama television series Grey’s Anatomy.

Bruce believes the internship program, which is now in its 10th year, is the only one of its kind at the undergraduate level. She is in the process of surveying the former interns to gain a better understanding of how the internship impacted them as medical professionals. Those results are expected in early June.

About Santa Clara University

Santa Clara University, a comprehensive Jesuit, Catholic university located 40 miles south of San Francisco in California’s Silicon Valley, offers its more than 8,800 students rigorous undergraduate curricula in arts and sciences, business, theology, and engineering, plus master’s and law degrees and engineering Ph.D.s. Distinguished nationally by one of the highest graduation rates among all U.S. master’s universities, California’s oldest operating higher-education institution demonstrates faith-inspired values of ethics and social justice. For more information, see www.scu.edu.